He was the last to arrive, and Kenneth presented him to a young husband
and wife whose names and portraits,—the Baron and Madame de
Montauban—he had seen in many illustrated journals devoted to “Society”
news.
De Montauban was a well-known amateur tennis player, he remembered, and
he seemed to be an amiable, vivacious fellow, with easy manners. His
wife was one of the prettiest women Bertram had seen in Paris where
there is no dearth of beauty—fresher, more “English,” as he was pleased
to think, than the typical Parisienne. Her complexion was almost as
Nature had made it, and she had soft brown eyes, with a very charming
way with them, but frank and unaffected.
Kenneth’s other guests were the Vicomte and Madame Armand St. Pierre de
Vaux, both of whom attracted Bertram with peculiar interest. The husband
had lost his left arm and part of his left leg at the first battle of
the Marne, but crippled as he was, he showed an astonishing gaiety of
spirit, and his lean face, with a little black moustache, and dark,
luminous eyes, seemed to Bertram like that of D’Artagnan, the adored
hero of his boyhood. His wife was a “_belle laide_,” plain but elegant,
and with adoring eyes for her crippled man whom she treated half as a
lover and half as a baby, fondling his hand, cutting up his meat,
laughing at his anecdotes as though she heard them for the first time,
and rebuking him for raising his voice too loud in a public restaurant.
To these attentions her husband responded with whimsical affection, like
a small boy with his mother, whom he adores though she tries his
patience.
Kenneth was a good host, speaking French perfectly, with a Parisian
accent which Bertram found a little hard to follow—as he had learnt
French colloquially among the peasants and bourgeoisie of Picardy—and
leading the conversation as easily and gracefully as in a London
drawing-room. Now and then, Bertram was aware of Kenneth’s glance upon
him, once or twice met his eyes and saw in them a kind of embarrassment,
like that startled look which he had given for just a second at their
meeting that morning in the Faubourg St. Honoré. But it was only the
faintest hint of uneasiness for some unknown cause, and was no more than
a shadow which left no trace in the sparkle of his conversation.
The table was laid for six, with Kenneth at one end and Armand de Vaux
at the other. Bertram had the privilege of sitting on the left of Mme.
de Montauban, who was next to Kenneth. Opposite were the Vicomte de
Montauban, and Mme. de Vaux—admirably arranged according to the
convention that husbands and wives must be kept as far apart as possible
when they eat in public.
There was a little general discussion as to the impossibility of getting
good food in Paris after the war, even at outrageous prices, due mainly
to the profiteering of Parisian middlemen. Presently Mme. de Montauban
turned to Bertram and speaking English with pretty accent, “felicitated”
him on the possession of so beautiful a wife, whom she had had the
pleasure of meeting several times.
Bertram’s mind winced a little at that word “possession,” but he merely
asked where Mme. de Montauban had happened to meet Joyce.
She seemed a little surprised at that question, and her glance flickered
for a moment in the direction of Kenneth.
“Everywhere in Paris,” she answered, with her beautiful smile. “She has
made many friends among us because of her love, so very great, for our
dear France.”
“_Tiens!_” said Armand de Vaux, on the other side of Bertram, “Monsieur
is the husband of Miladi Joyce! She is exquisite! An English rose!
Monsieur will pardon me if I confess that I fell desperately in love
with her!”
“It’s impossible to avoid that tribute!” said Kenneth. “Bertram Pollard
knows that all his friends are the slaves of his wife’s beauty. Isn’t it
so?”
He spoke in French, and his words sounded _chevale__resque_ and
romantic, with a lighter touch than they would have had in English. At
that “Is it not so?” he looked at Bertram, and their eyes met. Kenneth’s
smile seemed a little quizzing, as though he knew his friend’s quick
jealousy.
Bertram felt no kind of objection to Armand de Vaux’s declaration of
“desperate love,” though he was conscious of some secret reaction to
Kenneth’s endorsement.
“I am glad Joyce is so much admired,” he said simply.
Armand de Vaux paid a tribute to English womanhood. Most of his
knowledge of English character, as a young man, had been gained from
reading translations of Shakespeare during his _service militaire_ in
the barracks at Belfont. He had fallen in love with Rosalind, Beatrice,
and Katherine, above all with Beatrice, who was, he thought, essentially
English and Elizabethan. But he believed from better evidence than that
of reading, that English womanhood had retained that Elizabethan quality
of character—frankness, simplicity, courage, and above all, a
playfulness of spirit.
Mme. de Vaux tapped her husband’s hand.
“None of your amorous reminiscences here, Armand. Every one knows that
you are a monster of infidelity.”
“Before marriage I was a romantic,” he admitted with simple
self-satisfaction. “Since marriage I have been a model of single-hearted
devotion. It is still possible, however, that I may one day sow my last
peck of wild oats.”
This menace caused great laughter from De Montauban, and his wife, and
Kenneth rewarded the audacity of De Vaux, in the presence of his
wife—who seemed in no way perturbed—by filling up the glasses of his
guests with another bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and drinking to the
exploits of D’Artagnan—“Twenty Years After.”
Mme. de Montauban ventured to accuse Shakespeare of tremendous
plagiarism from Boccaccio and the Italian _novelli_, and there were
vivacious passages of arms between her and Kenneth, in the course of
which they quoted Italian poets at each other, so leaving Bertram for a
while outside the conversation, as he was ignorant of that language.
Armand de Vaux had a tête-à-tête with him.
“You fought in France, I have no doubt, sir?”
“The Somme, Flanders, Cambrai,” said Bertram.
“And still with both legs and both arms! That is wonderful. . . . You
see I lost two limbs in the Great War. I do not regret them. What
beautiful memories of comradeship and laughter, and immense valour! The
best years of our lives!”
He spoke with absolute sincerity, and with a new light in his eyes, as
though seeing with enthusiasm the vision of his fighting days.
“The comradeship was good,” said Bertram, “but the price was too great
for that. Why not comradeship without war?”
“_Pas possible!_ It needs war and the chance of death to bring out the
great qualities of men. Laughter is best when it is in the midst of
danger as a shield against fear. _Mon Dieu!_ how I laughed in those
days!”
He told some anecdotes of war. How the “popote” or mess had been
destroyed by a German shell when they were ravenous with hunger after a
long march to Ablain St. Nazaire; how they had killed a German
sergeant-major and two men, luring them into No-Man’s Land by driving a
lean pig through the barbed wire at dawn; how they had made a camouflage
tree on the Arras-Lens road and sniped Germans like rabbits before they
spotted it.
He was enormously amused at his own efforts to get wounded. No wound, no
decoration, was the custom in the French army, as far as the fighting
men were concerned. Of course, at the back of the front, any little cock
sparrow at Headquarters or the Base, could cover his breast with
ribbons. But in the front line the only chance of distinction was a
wound. For a long time he’d had the vilest luck. All his friends were
wounded—and decorated. He remained without a scratch, and without a
medal. The Colonel regarded him suspiciously, said he bore “a charmed
life,” as though he indulged in some private Juju to keep immune from
shell-fire and snipers’ bullets, aerial torpedoes, trench mortars, hand
grenades, and the whole “bag of tricks.” The situation became serious.
He walked in a veritable hail of shrapnel and nothing hit him. He made a
home of No-Man’s Land at night, leading patrols, but no, the Boche
ignored him. One day, in Arras, a monstrous aerial torpedo made straight
for him. “Ah, ha, my friend! At last you are going to do my trick!” But
the _sacré_ torpedo was a dud, and fell at his very feet without
exploding! _Quelle mauvaise chance!_ What infernal bad luck! However,
fortune’s wheel turned at last, and in the battle of the Somme, on the
right of the British, he lost his arm and leg and gained the _Médaille
Militaire_, and the _Croix de Guerre_.
Bertram joined in his gay laughter. This little French aristocrat was
not posing, nor indulging in vainglorious boasting. He had loved the
adventure of war, and found in it compensations for all its abominations
and its tragedy of great death. A thousand years of ancestry had given
him this instinct of war. Its spirit belonged to his blood. He was of
the same race and quality as Amadis de Gaul, Roland, Bertrand du
Guesclin, the Sieurs de Morny, the Knights of Froissart’s noble
Chronicles. Old Christy would have voted for his
death—theoretically—as a “carrier” of the war-microbe, as some people
are typhoid carriers, infecting all who come in contact with them.
“Then you don’t agree with _Le Feu_, by Barbusse, as a true picture of
the war from the _poilu’s_ point of view?” asked Bertram.
Armand de Vaux “went off,” like a trench mortar. He denounced that
book—the most terrible picture of war’s horror, which Bertram had read
before writing his own—as the work of a traitor to France, as
revolutionary propaganda of the vilest kind, an outrage upon the valour
of the French soldier.
Bertram was silent, not caring to risk a dispute at this table, but
pretty Mme. de Montauban expressed her own opinion.
“I had a nephew at Souchez and Notre Dame de Lorette—Pierre, as you
remember? He tells me that Barbusse has given an exact picture of those
trenches in the winter of ’15. The men were not relieved, month after
month. They lived and ate and slept and died, in mud and filth. Some of
them went mad, and others walked out into No-Man’s Land to end their
misery by a German bullet. You remember only the amusing side of war,
Vicomte! It is your temperament. In my hospital at Neuilly I saw too
much tragedy to believe in your romance.”
“Bah!” said the Vicomte de Vaux. “Tragedy? Death? They are part of life,
in peace as well as war. ‘A little laughter, a little love . . . and
then good night!’ What more can we ask, except a good fight? _Vive la
Guerre!_”
Mme. de Montauban laughed, and shook her head.
“That is the language of the eighteenth century. You speak that tongue,
I know. You belong to that period. But for us moderns there is no truth
in it. War has nearly destroyed our dear France. Another—and we die!”
“We shall have another,” said Armand de Vaux. “I shall weep to be out of
it, with only one leg and one arm.”
“Why shall we have another?” asked Bertram, and a little chill crept
down his spine, because of the calm and certain way in which the little
Vicomte had made that statement.
But it was the Baron de Montauban who answered.
“Surely,” he said, leaning forward a little, to flick the ash of his
cigarette into a bowl of flowers, “you are aware that your Lloyd George
arranges another for us?”
“Your Lloyd George!” Bertram had heard that phrase from peasants,
chambermaids, commercial travellers, shop-girls, the typist-secretary of
a music publisher. He did not expect to hear it from a French
aristocrat.
Kenneth made a protest, in his graceful way, deprecating unpleasant
themes, except when he happened to lead the argument in his best manner
as a one-time President of the Oxford Union.
“As office-boy at the British Embassy, I hesitate to listen to
accusations against my Prime Minister.”
Armand de Vaux laughed heartily at this diplomatic statement, and said
he had no more respect for Ministers of France than for Ministers of
England. They were all politicians, playing to their respective
galleries. As a soldier and a Royalist he despised them as _canaille_.
De Montauban pursued his idea relentlessly, despite this interlude.
“When I say your Lloyd George is arranging another war for France, I
mean all that body of opinion in Great Britain which calls itself
Liberal. _Mon Dieu!_ In their desire to be fair to the Germans—one
might as well be fair to his Majesty the Devil!—and in their anxiety to
trade again with their former enemy, they utterly ignore the French
point of view.”
“What is that?” asked Bertram, anxious to discover whether the Baron de
Montauban could give him more light than the peasants of the old
battlefields.
“We have only one point of view, and one demand,” said de Montauban.
“Security! . . . Security for France, after her sacrifice and her
victory. Where is that assurance?”
“In the ‘_tapage_’ of our ‘_soixante-quinzes_!’” said Armand de Vaux.
De Montauban shook his head.
“Let us not deceive ourselves. We are not strong enough to fight alone
against the _Boche_.”
“We have Poland as a gallant ally.”
“She will crumple like pasteboard between Germany and Russia.”
“Belgium, Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary,” said De Vaux.
“We must have England and the United States,” said De Montauban. “It was
they who made us sheathe our sword and abandon our full and just right
of vengeance against Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. We compromised
in return for a pledge of security from our allies. That pledge was
broken before the signature was dry on the Treaty. The Americans refused
to ratify the pledge of their President. It was our first betrayal.
Since then, by a sentimental illusion of world peace, all our rights
have been betrayed. The Germans have been encouraged to evade their
reparation payments, though without them France is bankrupt. When we
threaten to march into the Ruhr to enforce those payments, the Liberals
of England cry ‘Shame’ on us for provoking the poor dear Germans. What
will be the end of it? It is almost in sight. The Entente will be broken
between England and France. Germany will ally herself with Russia, with
whom also the English Liberals are sentimentalising, and France will
within the present generation be called upon to defend her soil again,
without Great Britain by her side. It is inevitable. It is certain. It
is the Great Betrayal. That is why we hate your Lloyd George, and all he
stands for.”
“The English people are loyal to us,” said Mme. de Montauban. She turned
to Bertram, and laid her little hand on his arm.
“We are sure that the real heart of England beats with us, after so much
common sacrifice, so much agony together. Is it not so?”
“It is true,” said Bertram, “I thank you for having said so, Madame.”
He found himself speaking emotionally, with a kind of passion in his
voice, which he tried to control.
“Since I’ve been in France, wandering about, I have heard nothing but
the French point of view. I agree with it a good deal. I am a lover of
France. But there’s another point of view.”
“Yes?” asked De Montauban, politely, but with a hint of sarcasm.
“Yes. It’s the English point of view. That of the common man, the
‘Tommy’ who fought in France.”
“Yes?” asked De Montauban again.
“I know it pretty well. You would like to hear?”
“Tell us!” said Mme. de Montauban.
“It’s just this. He doesn’t believe in kicking a man when he’s down,
even a German. And he does believe that another war will happen if
France presses Germany too hard. He doesn’t want another war, because he
has two million comrades out of work as a result of the last, and the
trade of England is ruined already. He wants peace, and he thinks the
way to get it is by a union of European peoples, forgetting hatred, and
no longer grouping into different Alliances, defensive or aggressive. He
believes in a League of Nations.”
“Then he believes in monstrous illusion,” said De Montauban, very
coldly, and Bertram thought of the French priest who banged his fist on
the table with the cry of “Illusion!”
“Speaking as a soldier,” said Armand de Vaux, “I see no safety for
France or England, except in the power of their artillery. And I would
give the luxury of this very charming dinner to sit in the mud again and
hear the _rafale_ of the _soixante-quinzes_ pounding the _Boche_ to
bits.”
“You’re a bloodthirsty ogre!” said his wife, caressing his only hand.
“You’re a despiser of my poor little banquet,” said Kenneth, ordering
some more Veuve Clicquot, and very artfully inviting an interruption of
waiters, to change the drift of conversation which abandoned politics
for a discussion on the psychology of “jazz,” led by the beautiful Mme.
de Montauban, in reference to the efforts of the orchestra.
Kenneth had to return to the Embassy at ten o’clock.
Mme. de Montauban and her husband were going to a reception by the
Duchesse d’Uzès. It was this lady who rose first, with a smile at Mme.
de Vaux who accepted the signal.
The other little parties in the restaurant paid tribute to her beauty
with their eyes, as Bertram helped to put her cloak on her shoulders.
She gave him her hand with a charming friendship.
“I understand your English point of view,” she said. “It is a little
dangerous, I think. The English heart is greater than the English head!”
Then she leaned forward to him, smiling, and spoke in a low voice.
“Do not leave your wife alone too much. She is too beautiful! That is
more important than politics—if you love her beauty!”
In another moment she was gone, with a rustle of silk and a gracious
smile.
Bertram was alarmed by those words of hers. Were they merely “French” in
their general sentiment, or a particular warning? They disturbed him
profoundly.
He walked with Kenneth through the Marché St. Honoré as far as the
Embassy. Kenneth seemed talkative, discussing those friends of his, as
though wishing to avoid other topics.
Bertram broke in across one of his subtleties.
“You’ve seen a good deal of Joyce lately?”
For just a second—no more than that—Kenneth hesitated in his reply.
“Yes. Longchamps—the Bois—the opera, and so on, in the usual way. It’s
been beautiful weather lately, don’t you think?”
Bertram was silent. He was not interested in the weather.
“You know that Joyce and I have not seen things altogether eye to eye
lately? She told you that?”
Kenneth again hesitated before his answer, as though weighing his words
with diplomatic caution.
“I was aware of some misunderstanding. . . . But if you’ll allow me to
say so, I never discuss relations between husband and wife. Don’t you
think that’s a good rule?”
He spoke in his friendliest way, but his rebuke, as it seemed, made
Bertram flush deeply.
“I have no intention of discussing my relations with Joyce. I merely
desired to thank you for having been a good friend to her during my
absence.”
Kenneth laughed, in a queer, strained way.
“My dear fellow! No need for thanks. . . . I try to play the game,
according to the rules.”
He raised his hand with a gesture that was almost a salute, and
disappeared into the British Embassy.